October 23, 1990: Breakthroughs come when I start writing and stop thinking

Thirty years ago today

 

            I talked with Henry in the morning and he said he couldn't afford to pay me $10 and hour, so I gave him my notice that I would quit after the next day. We worked until 17:00. 

            I had brought Susan's homework in with my to work on at lunchtime instead of my own song research. After work I went to the Parkdale Library and did research until the place closed at 20:00, but I couldn't find anything to help me. 

            When I got home I just started writing and then I made progress. That's usually how it works because the breakthroughs usually come when I don't think too much about a project. 

            At 22:00 I went to the store to buy a Coke. 

            Nancy didn't come by but she called. 

            I phoned Sebastian but she was very cold and unapologetic about having stood me up.

The Wonder of Canada

            On Wednesday morning I started translating “A la pêche des coeurs" (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian. 

            I finished memorizing “Tennisman” by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords. Finding none I began to work them out myself. 

            Just before 10:00 I logged on for my British Literature tutorial. When Alexandra started talking she was muted. I tried to tell her with my mic but I guess she couldn’t hear anyone else either until someone texted her and she unmuted herself. 

            We looked at the poetry of William Wyatt and Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey. Some poems are more satirical and some are about love combined with politics, while some are exclusively about love. 

            The volta is a philosophical or emotional turn. 

            I keep on having problems with my mic. Maybe before British Literature Part 2 in January I should go out and buy a mic that actually fits my computer. 

            I accidentally started taking the rest of my British tutorial notes in my Canadian Literature notebook. 

            There is a mixing of truth with the speaker posing as the author. I say that there is more of the author in a sonnet than in works like Chaucer’s or More's. The subject matter is more personal. Even in doing translations of poems they are only successful if one finds oneself in them. 

            Identity loss comes from trying to achieve a universal voice. 

            We were split into groups to analyze Surrey’s "Soote Season". I said that the “S” alliterations are relaxing and pleasant. 

            The volta is not always between the octave and the sestet. In this case it is just before the last line. Often one can find it by looking for “but" or "yet". 

            “Care decays, and yet sorrow springs”. I said that the poem presents the musicality of spring separate from his own sorrow. 

            How is time depicted? 

            My ceiling was leaking again and so I called my landlord. He said he’d come by tomorrow. After I hung up I looked a little closer and realized that the ceiling is not leaking but rather the top of the window frame. I suspect the water is coming down through the wall from the gutter. 

            I had crackers and cheddar for lunch. 

            I got caught up on my Canadian Literature notes and my journal. I wrote and posted an answer to this week’s Canadian Literature tutorial discussion question, even though we were told that we didn't have to do it before tutorial this time: 

           

            In Rohinton Mistry’s "Squatter", Sarosh’s dilemma of cultural assimilation is symbolized by the food cycle. He cannot take in the Wonder bread of Canadian culture, nor can he express what is inside of him in a Canadian manner. This lack of expression is comically represented by his inability to defecate without squatting. But Sarosh’s problem results from setting the impossible goal for himself of becoming culturally fully Canadian before arriving in Canada. He mistakes Canada for the melting pot that Nariman describes as being characteristic of the United States rather than the mosaic of multiculturalism that Canada tries to attain. He stands in contrast to Nariman the storyteller, who is comfortable in his own culture while assimilating the tropes of western culture that he chooses to include in his life, such as the music he whistles and the Mercedes that he drives. Sarosh fails to become Canadian because he tries to disconnect from India.

            I sliced another bottom off the round fruit and nut bread loaf and used it again as pizza crust with onion and garlic sauce and old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching Interpol Calling. 

            In this story Willi is a clown who travels with his daughter Lisa in the circus. His ambition is to put Lisa in school once they get to Rome. In order to make more business for the circus he wants to print handbills and buys a printing press at an unusually low price from a man named Keflik. He does not realize that Keflik is wanted for counterfeiting in the United States and that hidden in the press are an almost flawless set of plates of US $100 bills. The bills made from these plates could possibly be detected in the United States but no one in Europe would notice the difference. Keflik forces Willi to print the bills by threatening to hurt Lisa. When they get to Rome Willi looks into enrolling Lisa in a convent school. It is the middle of the term but the mother superior says she will make an exception. She gives Willi a copy of the school’s prospectus. When Keflik finds out he takes the prospectus away and tells Willi that he can’t put Lisa in a school because she is his way of forcing Willi to work for him and she would be safe if put in a school. Meanwhile Duval goes to Rome because the latest batch of counterfeit US money has begun to circulate there. He poses as a buyer of fake bills but Keflik is tipped off that Duval is a cop and Duval is knocked out. Keflik makes a getaway by wearing Duval’s hat but in doing so he leaves his own coat behind. In the coat Duval finds the school prospectus. He interviews the Mother and learns about Willi and Lisa and the circus. Suddenly Duval realizes that the printing press must be travelling with the circus and that explains the wide circulation of the fake money. Duval goes to the circus but when Keflik realizes Interpol is closing in he forces Willi and Lisa to the costume room and sits them at a table while he hides behind some clothing racks with a gun. He tells Willi to sit and put on his makeup when the police arrive. After standing behind and talking to Willi and Lisa and hearing Willi say he doesn’t know Keflik, suddenly Duval pushed Lisa out of the way and charges at the coat racks. He struggles with Keflik and finally knocks him out. The reason that Duval knew where Keflik was hiding was that Willi had written it on the makeup mirror for Duval. 

            Lisa was played by Waveney Lee, who was a teenager throughout most of her acting career. She auditioned for the role of the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan before the first season of Doctor Who but lost out to Carole Ann Ford. 

            The nun was played by Jean Anderson, who trained at RADA and for the first fifteen years of her acting career made a name for herself in theatre. After that she also played a wide range of supporting roles in film and television. She was a regular on two BBC series, “The Brothers” and "Tenko".

October 22, 1990: Susan hired me me to do a school project for her on Man Ray and Dali

Thirty years ago today 

            I was a few minutes late for work and so I didn't have a chance to talk with Henry about my raise.              Susan had come by the night before with a school project she wanted me to write for her that had to be ready by Wednesday. It was about surrealist photography. I was going to have to charge her more for this one because of the amount of research I would have to do and the short deadline. I went to the High Park Library on my way home and picked up a couple of books on the topic, but they prove themselves to be very helpful. When I got home I looked through all of the books she'd left me. There were two on Man Ray and another on Dali. 

            I wrote in this diary and did some other of my own work. 

            I went to bed on time.

October 21, 1990: I bought a vanilla milkshake and a Coke and mixed them together

Thirty years ago today

            I got up at around 10:30, shaved, showered, did the dishes and then went out. I was surprised to see so many lawn sales on a Sunday. On Dowling I bought three albums: Desiderata, Howard Jones and The Eurythmics for $1 each. On Sorauren I found a Rough Trade record. On Garden I got theatrical makeup, earrings, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for 25 cents each. 

            I walked up to Bloor, bought a vanilla milkshake and a Coke and mixed them together. 

            I went home, dropped my stuff off, took a shit and then went out again, this time with Nancy. We found a sale north of College on Ossington where a woman advised us to have the baby at home. 

            We went to a movie.

Squatter

            

            On Tuesday morning it was raining and the ceiling in my living room was leaking again. Lately when it rains it comes down on the window ledge and splashes onto the floor making a loud dripping sound. 

            While that was happening I dreamed about a bottle of red wine that was more important for the cork than the contents. I was transporting it home by bike when it got free and rolled away where I could see the top sticking out from where it lay on its side in the tall dead grass beside the side street that I crossed to continue to my place. In the dream this was just around the corner from my place and so familiar that I knew I could go home first and then come back to get the bottle later. But as I was waking up and slowly leaving the dream I knew less and less where this bottle was in relation to my actual home and became worried that I wouldn’t be able to find it after all. The street in the dream was more like a service road on the edge of town than anything near where I really live. 

            I downloaded the lyrics for “A La Pêche Des Coeurs” (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian and sang along with it a couple of times. It has a nice melody in the old "chanson" style. 

            I memorized the bridge for “Tennisman" by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I was still transcribing my British Literature lecture notes when I logged on for my Canadian Literature lecture. 

            I chatted with Professor Kamboureli on webcam but I’m still the only student that does so. She says students may have privacy issues about visually sharing their space. I asked how her mother was because she mentioned last week she was taking her for a covid test since two residents in her retirement home had contracted covid. She said this had been her 92 year old mother’s second test and she was still negative. 

            The professor reminded us that we are halfway through the course. She ran through the themes that we’ve covered so far: Canlit, settlement culture, colonialism, modernism; the tension between colonialism and modernism in Icefields. She says the “double gaze" characterizes most expressions of Canadian Literature. One looks back to come to terms with the past. In Icefields postmodernism both represents and challenges. Ethnography reflects an ambivalent western view. Imposing a world view in which the other is inferior. Cartwright was disappointed that his Inuit visitors were not impressed with British civilization. They are fetishized in England and almost all die of smallpox. The impact of modernity, the sublime, the trope of wilderness, Canada haunted by a lack of ghosts. She had to remove Northrop Frye from the syllabus but the link to the conclusion of his first history of Canadian literature is on Quercus. He doesn’t ask what is Canadian identity or who, but rather where is here. Colonialism lingers and is embodied. 

            We returned to Austin Clarke’s story “Canadian Experience”. George’s father is privileged and not poor and so George is an atypical immigrant from the Caribbean. I would say that people immigrate either to improve their lives economically or because they are pushed from home by oppressive forces. So what motivates George to come to Canada? The story problematizes the Canadian perspective on what motivates immigration. His father owns a plantation but he would probably have descended from slaves forced to work on a plantation. The father is irrational and removed from reality. He claims that his family owned the plantation since before there were Indigenous people in Canada. Maybe George came to Canada just to get away from his father’s authority. George finds Canada to be a white woman.

            What is Canadian experience? Toronto is said to have the world’s most educated cab drivers. Forgetting who we are. George’s father’s plantation has a name. It is strangled by vines. Abjection is the condition of being othered by the dominant society. George worked delivering flyers but took pleasure in cheating the system by throwing his flyers away. The bank where George comes to apply for a job is in the same building where he had worked as a janitor. George is as irrational as his father. A white actress as the personification of the system. She has red and white cold sores. Red and white like the Canadian flag. The ugly red subway train of the TTC. Pat seems to understand the system although she is also abjected. Canada is feminized and black men are emasculated. She says “imagination is a euphemism for lies”. She is deluded. She is cast as being willing to do sexual favours. She names George. The elevator is symbolic of upward or downward mobility. The subway’s mobility is underground and ambivalent. The driver has mobility and this is his last trip, as well as George’s. Someone said it reminded her of the song “People get ready there’s a train coming” by Curtis Mayfield. 

            Why does George go to apply for a job for which he has no qualifications? I asked if he really had no qualifications. I think all one needs to work in a bank are a high school diploma or a GED. He could have given it a shot. He has low self esteem. Colonials penetrate the land. George is asserting his masculinity against his father. 

            W.E.B. Dubois writes of “Double Consciousness”. Looking at one’s self through the eye of the dominant other. The inner conflict by the marginalized as a result of oppression. We took a break, after which we talked about multiculturism. 

            The official Canadian policy on multiculturism comes from certain legal acts. 1951- The Royal Commission on National Development of the Arts (Massey). There was an awareness of the threat of domination by US culture. The CBC and the Canada Council were formed. The pdf is widely available.

            1963- The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. 

            1969- The Canadian Official Languages Act. 

            1971- Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s White Paper on Multiculturalism. She says that Trudeau was motivated by the fact that an election was approaching and he needed the ethnic vote. 

            1982- The repatriation of the Canadian Constitution. 

            1988- With Bill C-93 Trudeau’s White Paper becomes official policy under Mulroney. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act. Acknowledgement of French does not come to terms with aboriginal languages. What about the other immigrants? The act did not include the territories. I wonder why. There must have been a logical reason. Maybe the territories were too small administratively to enforce the Act. She says the Act deliberately left out Indigenous people. 

            Canada’s multiculturalism policy is displayed in folk festivals and communities like Chinatown, Korea Town and Little Italy. There is the assumption that other cultures are homogenous. 

            The pros for immigrant integration: 

            It removes barriers to participation. 

            It makes people feel welcome. 

            It leads to a sense of belonging. 

            The cons: 

            It leads to ghettoization and balkanization. 

            It encourages ethnic groups to look inward. 

            It emphasizes differences. 

            It fossilizes ethnic identity. 

           

            It’s showy for Canada but threatens the dominant society. It presents difference as inferior and makes identity uncontainable. People don’t feel that they belong. 

            In the Rohinton Mistry story “Squatters" Nariman explains that multiculturalism is a Canadian invention that tries to make the country a cultural mosaic rather than a melting pot like in the United States. 

            Mistry writes mostly novels but this is from a collection of short stories. Nariman is successful in India. His stories are told in the courtyard of a Parsi compound in Mumbai. 

            The Parsi community in India originated in Iran. They are Zoroastrians and there are about 60,00- 70,000 of them in India. She was a guest professor in Mumbai and visited some of the compounds. 

            Nariman wears a Clark Gable moustache. He drives a Mercedes which he nicknames, “My pride and joy.” He whistles “Rose Marie” by Slim Whitman and the theme from the “Bridge on the River Kwai”. He uses a mixed vocabulary, code switching from one cultural ideology to another. 

            There is no such thing as being purely Indian since there are so many cultures within a population of over 1.3 billion. 

            Savukshaw in cricket match between empire and colony, between India and the UK.

            Postcolonialism is a transhistorical concept. Success alone does not bring happiness. Multiculturism is satirized as being imbedded in the body in both how we eat and how we shit. 

            We have to wait for our essay marks because of all the people that handed in their assignments late. 

            As a final comment I rolled in back to Clarke’s “Canadian Experience”. I said that while we’d been talking about the story before the break it occurred to me how much the ending is similar to a story by Willa Cather called “Paul’s Case”. Although Cather’s story is not racialized it does deal with a troubled young man who tries to make it in the city far from home and in failing commits suicide by jumping in front of a train heading in the direction of home. I wondered if Clarke might have read that story. She said he probably had since he’d read just about everything. She visited his town home once and it was crowded with books piled up everywhere. 

            For lunch I had chips and salsa with yogourt. 

            I worked on finishing my British Literature lecture notes and then typed most of my Canadian Literature notes before dinner. 

            I rubbed an outside round beef roast in a paste of olive oil, thyme, rosemary, garlic powder, salt and pepper and roasted it for an hour and forty five minutes. I had a slice for dinner with a potato and gravy while watching Interpol Calling. 

            In this story a scuttled ship is found off the coast of Kenya with sixteen dead natives in the hold. It is a suspected slave ship and Interpol has so many files of unsolved slave trading cases that Duval is fed up and decides to investigate this one more deeply. In 1959 an estimated 23,000 Africans a year make the pilgrimage to Mecca but less than half return to their villages. Even if only 10% of the missing are sold into slavery it’s still a large figure. Duval goes to Mombassa where he meets a Colonel Briggs. Briggs’s driver is a native named Sergeant Hamid and Briggs orders him around like a slave and it may not be a racial thing but a British military thing. They discover that the dhow in question had to be sunk because the dead men had the plague. The ship had an engine and so Duval has the serial number checked. The dead men were probably East Africans on their way to Mecca. Duval checks with the WHO for the locations of recent plague outbreaks. Meanwhile we find the owner, Lenoir finding out that one of the crew of his boat has the plague. He calls his boss, who tells him to kill him. The body is dumped in the harbour. The ship’s engine is traced to a dealer in Mombassa who says he sold it to Lenoir. Sergeant Hamid says he’s made the pilgrimage to Mecca on one of Lenoir’s boats. They fish out the body of the dead man and identify him. They learn from his father that the captured men all came from the same village. Duval and Briggs come to arrest Lenoir and he pulls a gun. Briggs carries a swagger stick like many British officers used to do. In one quick stroke he disarms Lenoir and with a second he knocks him out. Duval is impressed. They conclude that Lenoir must have a boss that collects the villagers up country. The last group came from a village called Akello and so they go there where there is a hospital serving several villages. They talk to the director Dr Gorman but he says he knows nothing of any missing villagers but the nurse remembers the men leaving for the pilgrimage together. She also tells Duval that the doctor examines the men of the villages before they leave together. Duval asks the doctor why he didn’t report that the sixteen men that left the village had the plague. Gorman points a syringe full of deadly poison at Duval. They struggle and the doctor is about to prick Duval when Briggs comes in and hits him with his swagger stick. Duval says he’ll have to get one of those. Briggs said they are useful if you don’t want to dirty your hands. 

            Sergeant Hamid was played by Errol John, who started off as an amateur actor and a playwright in Trinidad and then moved to Britain. He co-starred in the TV movie “A Man from the Sun” in 1956. The next year his play, “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl” won the Observer Drama Competition. In 1960 it went off Broadway in New York with James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson and was well received. He played Othello at the Old Vic in 1963. Despite some recognition and some movie roles in successful film he did not get a lot of opportunities.

October 20, 1990: The food and service were lousy but our table was an Arkanoid game and Nancy hit the ball 20 times

Thirty years ago today

            In the morning I talked with Henry about the ultimatum about a raise I'd left on his machine. He said he'd discuss it with Ice and let me know next week. 

            I worked for nine hours. When I got home I was too tired to go dancing and so Nancy and I made love. I told her to take her clothes off and then I fucked her from behind while still dressed. After that we went up to The Range to have dinner. I had a Caesar salad and a charbroiled chicken sandwich and Nancy had nachos. It wasn't terrific and service was slow but our table was an Arkanoid game and Nancy hit the ball a whole twenty times in one set.

Elizabeth's Dress is Listening

            On Monday morning I memorized the chorus and the second verse of “Tennisman” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            For lunch I had kettle chips and salsa with cream cheese. 

            At around 10:30 I logged on for my British Literature lecture. This lecture was about lyric poetry and analyzing poetic language, meter and sound. 

            For most of the rest of this course England is a Protestant country. 

            Henry VIII was succeeded by Edward VI but he died at 15. His daughter Mary I became Queen for five years, but she was Catholic and had 280 Protestants burned at the stake, earning her the nickname of “Bloody Mary”. She probably died of ovarian cancer and then Elizabeth I became queen.

            Elizabeth renewed her father’s break with Rome but in a sense the metaphorical ghost of Bloody Mary became the backdrop of religious tensions in England. 

            Diane Morgan wrote that Henry VIII was the “kingiest king who ever kinged”. His reign was about opulence, but he was inconsistent, autocratic and self-serving. He was brutal to his six wives and considered a tyrant by the people of his era. It was a volatile, bloody period with sharp shifts in factional power. This was the backdrop for the poets Wyatt and Surrey who blended poetry with politics. 

            Henry VIII was also a poet and a songwriter. He is credited with the authorship of several songs, including “Green Groweth the Holly”. 

            Because many of Henry’s actions were motivated by his desire for a male heir the English reformation is considered to be an erotic period. Henry was so smitten by Anne Boleyn that in 1526 he went to a joust with his armour bearing the imagery of a tortured lover. On his chest was a picture of a heart in a vice shooting flames, accompanied by the words, “I dare not declare.” His suffering can’t be expressed and yet he declares it. This kind of erotic intensity over the pressure of disclosure was critical to the sonnet. 

            A lyric poem is a short description of intense emotion in the first person. They are more interior than the usual story. In Italian “sonnet” means “little sound”. Petrarch was not the inventor of the form but he was the king of the Italian sonnet who wrote a long sequence of scattered rhymes. 

            The Petrarchan sonnet has fourteen lines of interlocking rhymes. The first eight lines or octave rhymes always in “abba abba”, while the final six lines or sestet is usually “cdd ece” but this scheme is more flexible and could have three rhymes or two rhymes. The key is in the thematic break or volta between the octave and the sestet. It signals a turn to a different content

            The English loved Petrarchan sonnets and used them to express the struggle to articulate intense erotic desire. 

            Wyatt’s adaptation of Petrarch’s Sonnet 134 juxtaposes the absence of war and peace; burning and freezing; in an unlocked prison from which there is no escape; he can’t live or die. He is torn by opposing paradoxical emotions with a disturbing sense of bodily experience alienated from the self. The poem is claustrophobic in its structures of antithesis. The first three lines begin with “f” sounds “I find”, “I fear”, “I fly”. 

            The size of a sonnet makes it a compression chamber to force a magnitude of emotions into a small space. The constraints of the rules turn it into a pressure cooker for the compression of diamonds. It invites an exploration of interiority that is hard to pin down. The sonnet depicts a process by which feelings and the self are discovered. 

            Thomas Wyatt lived from 1503 to 1542. He was a diplomat and discovered Petrarch while on a mission to Italy. He began to translate his work but translation is a creative process and Wyatt takes liberties with Petrarch’s poems. His poems depart from Petrarch’s and express alternative views.

            Petrarch’s Rima 190 begins: "A white doe to frolic on the grass / Appeared and on her head were golden horns."  The deer is off limits because it is protected by Caesar, the speaker stumbles and the deer vanishes. 

            Wyatt’s version begins: "Whoso wants to hunt, I know where there’s a hind /  But as for me alas I may no more / The vain travail has wearied me so sore  / I am of them that farthest come behind."    Structurally Wyatt frames the theme differently than Petrarch. He relates to the imagined reader some instruction in where to hunt. He advises from the viewpoint of failure. Petrarch first sights the deer and then fails in the hunt, while Wyatt begins having already failed. I know where she is, but I can’t catch her. Petrarch is linear while Wyatt is jagged. But “as she flees afore, fainting I follow.” Wyatt’s speaker pursues the dear deer while at the same time knowing he has already failed. He cannot help himself. 

            The “f” sounds of “as she flees afore, fainting I follow” create a panting sound to simulate the exhaustion of pursuit. 

            Both the octave and the sestet begin with “who”. The message is that the hunt is impossibly vain and guaranteed to fail. Wyatt’s sestet has a couplet at the end in “ee” rhyme bringing a second change of direction but not in the speaker’s voice. Petrarch put this other voice at the volta where he says, “Let no one touch me. It has pleased my Caesar to make me free.” But Wyatt’s version is more about ownership, “No one may touch me, for Caesar’s I am.” It echoes Christ’s order to Mary Magdalene when she sees him alive after the crucifixion. Wyatt’s deer is wild to hold although she seems tame. This could either be interpreted as her being “too wild to hold” or “wild to hold”. The speaker concludes that it is not his fault that he cannot have her but that of political forces. 

            This poem might be autobiographical with Caesar representing Henry VIII. Wyatt was rumoured to have fucked Anne Boleyn but there is no evidence. Henry’s court was flooded with anxiety over all of the executions and so honesty was a liability. Sonnets provided a secret means of expression for private thoughts. The relation between the poet and the speaker is often hard to pin down. Maybe a speaker is a character in a fictional story. Wyatt’s poem plays with one voice but ends in another. But whose voice is speaking at the end? The words are written on a sign around the deer’s neck and so this might be an imperial decree co-opting the deer’s voice. But then again the speaker might be blaming his plight on the government to ease the pain of his own failure. 

            We are shown the image of a draft of Wyatt’s “What Rage is This?” There are different coloured inks reworking lines, words are crossed out and replaced. 

            Wyatt is famous for his sonnets but also for longer poems. We looked at his ballad, “They flee from me”. 

            “Stanza” means “stopping place” or “room”. The stanzas serve to progressively organize his thoughts. 

            In the first stanza he imagines past loves in erotic hunts from which they ran. The language is ambiguous and the lovers are spoken of as if they are animals. He is jaded and bitter and inter-threads the past with the present. 

            The second stanza tracks the movement of his thoughts to the past. She says to him :”Dear heart, how like you this” and so there is a pun on the fact that a “hart” is a male deer. She has hunted and caught him. 

            The third stanza declares that it was all true. The voice is increasingly bitter and sarcastic. When he says, “But since that I so kindly am served” he means the opposite. And in the end with, “I would fain know what she hath deserved” he wants revenge. Wyatt is the poet laureate of ugly emotions. 

            The last stanza is “ababbcc”. In meter each pattern is a foot. The feet stalking in his chamber may be the metrical feet of the poem and the room in the poem may be the room of the poem. This may be meant as a farewell to love or to love poetry. “Danger” doesn’t quite rhyme with “remember”. The poem is about the changeability in power or love. 

            In “Who list his wealth and ease retain” Wyatt adapts Seneca’s Phaedra for the first two stanzas. The greatest disasters effect those who have the most to lose. What mighty disasters toss the mighty. Jove attacks powerful men and ignores the common people. The Latin refrain at the end of each stanza translates as, “Around thrones he thunders.” In politics there is always danger of downfall. “Who would his wealth and ease retain / himself let him unknown remain.” Stay far away from heaven. 

            The third stanza is in the first person and it is tempting to read it as autobiographical since he was in prison when he wrote it. Anne Boleyn failed to give Henry a male child and so was arrested and placed in the Tower of London. Wyatt was in the Bell tower and could see Anne’s execution from his cell window. He saw “such sight that in my head sticks day and night.” 

            There is a shifting context and he might put words “around thrones he thunders” in new meaning for each stanza. In the fourth stanza the thunderer may be Henry. The Latin may act as a secret code to conceal this. In the fifth stanza, “Bear low, therefore give god the stern.” Let god steer. He may be expressing a hope for god to intervene and to bring about Henry’s downfall. Wyatt lived for six more years and then died of fever. 

            Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey was a poetic follower of Wyatt, fourteen years younger. In Petrarch’s Rima 310 the octave is about natural beauty while the sestet speaks of sadness from the beloved. Surrey’s version experiments with a change of direction at the last minute as if he was playing chicken with the sonnet. The poem is about the change of season and in the end he puns with “my sorrow springs”. In the sestet the alliteration is in pairs with couplings such as “fish float”, “swift swallow”, and “busy bee” as if it were some kind of poetic Noah’s ark. The message is that coupling causes sorrow. 

            With the rhyme scheme “ababcdcdefefgg” Surrey created what later became known as the Shakespearian sonnet. 

            “Th’assyrians’ King” is based on Sardonopoulis, who was infamous for his indulgent court. The poem is a portrait in contempt of lust in politics and may be about Henry. Anne Boleyn and another of Henry’s wives were Surrey’s cousins. The poem may be wishing Henry dead. 

            Wyatt was not in print in his lifetime but selections of his work were collected in a manuscript by his sister and then circulated. 

            The early 16th Century was a time of self-assessment in England. In 1532 the first works of Chaucer were printed. It was the first time a publication featured an author. Surrey wrote on Wyatt in 1542. He did not use a sonnet but rather a blason, which describes various body parts of the subject, each with a corresponding virtue. “A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme / that robbed Chaucer the glory of his wit.” He is saying that Wyatt was better than Chaucer. This is the first time an author was canonized in print and it’s also ironic because Wyatt was not in print at the time of his death.

            In 1557 Richard Tuttel compiled an anthology featuring poems by Wyatt, Surrey and others.

            In 1589 George Puttenham wrote The Art of English Poesy. In the first age were Chaucer and Gower and in the second age Wyatt and Surrey. 

            Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me” has lines with five iambic feet. An iamb is a metrical foot with one unstressed and one stressed syllable. If there are five of these it means the line is in iambic pentameter. 

            The second line of this poem is not so regular. The final stanza is irregular but Tuttel regularized it for his book, which restarted the popularity of the sonnet in England. 

            Petrarch had a sonnet sequence but Wyatt and Surrey did not. The first English sonnet sequence was by Anne Locke. 

            How different were Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Barnfeld and Shakespeare from Wyatt and Surrey? 

            After Bloody Mary, when Elizabeth I became queen she pursued a religious settlement with the Act of Supremacy in 1558. The British monarch was no longer for the Church of England the equivalent to the Catholic pope. She became the supreme governor of the church. Her rein was officially over a Protestant country but she was trying to calm down internal conflicts. 

            Richard Mulcaster wrote in The Queen’s Majesty's Passage that the monarchy is a performance. In one of the portraits of Elizabeth she is wearing a gown covered with images of eyes and ears. Perhaps this was to convey omniscience but also surveillance. 

            Elizabeth never married and so came to be known as “The Virgin Queen”. Her motto translates as "Always the same". 

            The pope released his Catholic subjects in England from allegiance to Elizabeth. England sided with the Protestant Dutch against Catholic Spain. In 1588 the Spanish tried to invade England and on August 9 of that years she rode to the coast in armour and gave a famous speech to encourage the troops. 

            Elizabeth’s mother Ann Boleyn stressed the importance of education and her daughter benefited from Humanism in receiving a classical education as did the daughters of Thomas More. Elizabeth was fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian and French and she continued into her old age translating the works of Horus, Plutarch, Boethius and Tacitas. 

            Elizabeth’s speeches were masterpieces. She wrote “The Doubt of Future Foes” about the threat of Mary Queen of Scots and her followers. John Harrington got hold of a copy and distributed it but Elizabeth was said to disapprove of being caught writing poetry. But some speculate that she deliberately leaked the poem in order to convey its message. In the poem she expressed doubt, apprehension and dread of the danger of her enemies. The poem turns later to a declaration that “this should not happen”. Her enemies are clouded. The poem builds with references to nature: tide, clouds, grafted root and develops from vegetation to declaring that Mary shall “reap no harvest”. To raise rebellion in England is futile. The poem answers the question, “Who gets to control nature?” and declares that Mary is an unsuccessful gardener while Elizabeth will eliminate the weeds. She uses the internal rhyme of “top of hope” and assonance in “root of rue”. “For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb / which should not be if reason ruled and wisdom weave the web.” The root of the word “text” is texere, which means “to weave” as in “the words of the poem were woven wisely.”

            As usual, transcribing my handwritten lecture notes took up my day and evening until dinner. 

            I had a potato, gravy, and the wing and spine of a chicken for dinner while watching Interpol Calling. 

            In this story a passenger in sunglasses travelling under the name of Chu Luon uses tear gas and a gas mask to highjack a passenger plane that is also carrying a large shipment of platinum. He safely lands the plane himself on an abandoned US airstrip in Burma. The platinum is transferred to a light plane waiting on the strip. In Hong Kong the same man passes through customs showing a picture of a Chinese man on his passport but unrealistically he is not asked to remove his sunglasses. Interpol finds that the same method of highjacking has been used twice before but with different Chinese names on the passports. Duval says that if he fails to successfully land a passenger plane on one of those tiny jungle strips it will be mass murder and so he has to be stopped. Duval flies to Hong Kong. Duval concludes that the highjacker must be connected with the Hong Kong airport to have known about the platinum shipment. The Hong Kong airport police inspector appoints his airport staff officer Bill Grant to check on all Chinese employees of the airport. We learn when the Caucasian Bill Grant goes home to his wife Jane that Bill is the “Chinese” highjacker and Jane is his accomplice. Bill goes to a hotel in his Chu Luon disguise and shows his passport to ask for a ticket to Manila. The clerk notifies Interpol and when they arrive they are told Luon went into the washroom. Inside they find Bill Grant washing his face. He says someone came in but he didn’t look at him. They conclude Luon must have gone out through the window. Later Luon’s coat is found in the harbour with a bullet hole in it, along with several passports and $50,000 in the shoulder pads. Duval notices that the bullet hole is in the part of the jacket that would have been buttoned underneath and concludes that Luon faked his own death. Duval observes that no witnesses have seen Luon without sunglasses. They conclude that he could be a European and so they begin to investigate all employees. When Bill Grant learns of this he tells Jane to book two flights to Tokyo while he goes home to get their money and passports. Looking through the staff records it is discovered that Grant is a former RAF pilot trained in Canada and he speaks Chinese. Grant goes home and only takes his own passport because he’s decided to ditch Jane. Duval goes to the airport and find Jane but realize Grant decided to take a boat to Macao instead. Duval misses the boat but confidently tells the inspector that Grant will be caught in three and a half hours in Macao because it’s Portuguese territory and Portugal is a member of Interpol. 

            Jane was played by Jan Holden, who played in many theatrical comedies, appeared in several British television series in the 1950s and a few films in the 60s such as “The Stranglers of Bombay”; “Work is a 4-Letter Word” and "The Best House in London".